Vietnam War corro Strathdee remembered

IN a time before war correspondents were "embedded" or wore flak jackets or told their stories through computers hooked up to satellite phones, their predecessors performed miracles with a skerrick of information and typed up their stories on a Remington or an Olivetti.

They would bribe someone in a telegraph office or a hotel to try to get their copy got through first and they would invariably find the best meal in the worst town and a decent drink to go with it.

Little wonder Robin Strathdee was the perfect man to talk to back in Brisbane or Melbourne or Sydney when you needed to get the job done and to be nourished afterwards.

Strathdee became a war correspondent in Vietnam at the age of 22 working for Australian Associated Press at a time when the war was reported by journalists who went to Saigon on six-month rotations and learned quickly how to do their job and how to live.

Strathdee, who died last week in Melbourne aged 68, learned both lessons extraordinarily well.

The son of a Bundaberg sugar cane farmer, Strathdee was educated firstly in his home town and then at St Brendan's in Yepoon, becoming a journalist in the early 1960s when newspapers were part of a vibrant, energetic industry.

A cadetship on the Courier-Mail in Brisbane, where he graduated into the newsroom, was followed by his first stint at AAP and his tour of duty in Vietnam.

From there, Strathdee joined the Reuters international news service firstly in London and then serving as that agency's correspondent in Singapore and Jakarta.

Another spell at the Courier-Mail preceded another at AAP, where he became the Brisbane Bureau Chief, then Queensland manager before transferring to Melbourne as the national newsagency's southern region manager.

As the mobile phone invaded the world, the versatility of the old Vietnam hack came to the fore and he joined AAP's telco offshoot, AAPT, guiding the business in Melbourne for more than a decade.

In newspapers around the country in the week since he died, Strathdee's credits have been listed at length: athlete, war correspondent, epicure, raconteur, mate, father, brother, husband and "poppie".